Juvenile crime in Britain
Britain’s Home Secretary Jacqui Smith that crime had fallen, that people were safer than they have been for 10 or 20 years, and that once everyone was convinced of this “truth”, we would praise New Labour for making us all so much more secure.
Which planet is she on? … Back here on Earth, the rest of us know that this is only so much baloney because we rely upon what we see with our own eyes….
If, as Miss Smith averred yesterday, crime is at its lowest level for 20 years, how is that she is proposing to install metal detectors at school gates to stop pupils carrying knives into the classrooms, as though parts of Britain were like south-west Los Angeles?
If crime has fallen, why are the prisons so full that courts are under pressure to send fewer offenders to jail in order to relieve the overcrowding, thereby ensuring criminals who should be behind bars are out and about and free to assault, rob and burgle?
– from Philip Johnston, “Crime is falling? Tell that to our children”, The Telegraph (UK), January 21, 2008
URL: www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/main.jhtml?xml=/opinion/2008/01/21/do2102.xml
Of the three women pictured here, one is the President of the Supreme Court, the second the Vice Prime Minister and Minister for Foreign Affairs, and the third is the Speaker of the Parliament. Women in positions of real power, and all are members of a Middle East government.
Any magazine committed to feminism, the empowerment of women, and the evolution of women’s rights in the Middle East would hunger for such a photo, or so you would think.
Yet, Ms Magazine refused to publish these photos of Dorit Beinish, Tzipi Livni and Dalia Itzik, three Middle East women whose society does not treat women as chattel and encourages the development of their full human potential.
The problem for Ms Magazine was that these are Jewish women, holding office in Israel, and the caption beneath the photo reads, “This is Israel.”
This is not the face of Israel the political Left wants people to see.
This is not the David (Palestine) and Goliath (Israel) commonly depicted in news footage of Palestine children throwing stones at Israeli Jeeps and tanks….
So, why should anyone be surprised that Ms Magazine, which bills itself not just as a magazine but a feminist social movement, should refuse to run an advertisement, however accurate, that would depict Israel in a way that would be incongruous with leftist propaganda?
The need to create scapegoats is a natural tendency for all movements that mobilise true believers. It makes no difference if the movement mobilises itself in the interests of race or class, or even gender. Such movements require simplistic solutions to complex problems. And all such movements use hatred as the great unifier.
My liberal Jewish friends and supporters of Ms Magazine and its advertisers should ask themselves this simple question: From what other country would Ms Magazine refuse to put three women on its cover?
From China which occupies Tibet? From Mozambique where dictatorship has run amuck? From any of a number of societies where women are treated as chattel, mutilated, and denied the rudiments of self determination?
Israel and Israel alone is shunned.
– from Prof. Abraham H. Miller, “The Feminists and the Jews”, American Thinker, January 18, 2008.
URL: www.americanthinker.com/2008/01/the_feminists_and_the_jews.html
